A Very Long Night
by mywarisalreadywon
Summary: AU end of the world type thing here. Dean didn't fight supernatural things all his life. I wrote this for my school's literary magazine and based the guy off of Dean and figured I'd post it here.


**AU end of the world type thing here. Dean didn't fight supernatural things all his life. I wrote this for my school's literary magazine and based the guy off of Dean and figured I'd post it here. **

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He had to remind himself to keep moving. The tall, broad-shouldered man looked at the sun as it began its ascension; he blocked the rays from directly entering his emerald green eyes and carded his hand through his dark blond hair as he turned and walked away from the blaze on his right. He got to his car as quickly as he could and pulled out of the overgrown remnants of what was once a parking lot. The now-burning motel was bright in his rearview mirror even in the early morning light. The owners of the motel had died long ago, and the only other inhabitants were better off left to the flames. At least once they burned up they wouldn't be able to hurt the few souls left on this wasteland of a planet. He did this a lot, maybe once or twice a month. He would emerge from his underground bunker – the one he found almost three months after this nightmare started – and he would go to a city. The city didn't even have to be close; it just had to have a refuge that would last as long as he needed it to so that he could burn the city to the ground. This city in particular was nearly finished. He'd been up as soon as the sun came up the mountain to start burning the buildings to the ground.

He would always look for the living and torch the dead. The living would stay with him until he happened upon a car that looked like it would still run. He would quickly get it into running order and give the person a map. The map led to a place out west where people could find shelter, if only for a few nights. The people that ran the old roadhouse would even teach newcomers how to handle a weapon and give them one and some ammunition. He assumed they had their own ways of getting these various weapons, but they'd bought some that he'd found. Money was worthless so they'd given him canned food and some salted meat in exchange for his troubles. They were good people, and they never turned down someone who was lost. Business had to be slow though; he'd only found six living people in the last three months.

His car was rusting away in some places, but the former mechanic-turned-FBI-informant couldn't bring himself to care. He actually couldn't bring himself to care about anything anymore. He didn't care that he would have to fight his way through a mass of the living dead when he got home – because it would be dark by then and everyone knows that that's when they come out. He didn't care that everyone he had ever known and loved was dead. He didn't care that his efforts at saving people were probably useless because those people would most likely be dead within the month they were found anyway. He didn't care that there was probably only a couple thousand people – if that – still left on the earth. He didn't care that the world was nearly finished dying and he most certainly didn't care that his death would probably be bloody and it would be without the company of any other living soul. He just hadn't been able to really care about much of anything since his wife and daughter were killed. Those deaths had been harder to deal with than his brother's; someone he had thought he could never live without.

In the life he had had before, he was a mechanic. He had been working in garages since high school and had found a refuge in cars after his parent's divorce. After graduating from college, he bought his own little shop in a moderately-sized town and enjoyed a quiet life with his high school sweetheart. Some of his subordinates had decided that it would be a good idea to get mixed in with some really bad people and eventually they came to the shop. The FBI offered their services and before he knew it, he was signed up to be an informant for them. They had given him some training as a precaution and he had boxed in high school, so things didn't end too badly for him. Those fighting skills were what helped him to survive for the past two years. He had also mastered something that few other survivors could achieve: he stopped thinking of them as human bodies. They hadn't been human in quite some time.

Hours passed quickly on empty roads and before he knew it, he was fighting his way to the bay door that would lead to the little bunker he called home. After fighting his way in using the blowtorch he had made over a year ago, he locked, bolted, and blocked the doors and windows. He settled down in his kitchen, the only room with only one single light, and held a glass in one hand and a bottle of amber liquid in the other.

Like every night, his dreams would be filled with screams and blood and faces of the people he lost. The drinks wouldn't kill the nightmares, but they would ease the pain he was sure to feel in the morning.

As he listened to the howls of the wind and the dead above him, he sighed and closed his eyes.

It was going to be a very long night.


End file.
